Wednesday, August 31, 2011

In her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee bio, Janis Joplin is described as “the greatest white urban blues and soul singer of her generation.” In 1968, she was still forging that voice, having come off a triumphant performance at the Monterey Pop Festival the summer before. Her San Francisco-based group, Big Brother & the Holding Company, charted soon after with their self-titled debut, but it stalled at #60. Their second album, Cheap Thrills, fared better, spending a whopping eight weeks atop the charts. Rolling Stone magazine named it one of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

The same week the album launched its chart run, Janis & Co. hit the Billboard Hot 100 with their maiden entry, “Piece of My Heart”. The song peaked at #12, but reached iconic status. It has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and is featured on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of “The Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll”.

The song was written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns. Erma Franklin, the sister of Rock Hall inductee Aretha Franklin, recorded the song in 1967 and took it to the top ten in the R&B charts. Big Brother & the Holding Company’s rendition a year later has become the definitive version, but it has been notably covered by others, including Dusty Springfield, Sammy Hagar, Faith Hill, and as a duet between Melissa Etheridge and Joss Stone.

Joplin embarked on a solo journey after Cheap Thrills, but her days were numbered. A heroin overdose cut her life short at 27 years old on October 4, 1970. 1971’s Pearl and “Me and Bobby McGee” were posthumous #1 hits.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Originally published in my "Aural Fixation" column on PopMatters.com on Aug. 25, 2011. See original post here.

image from popmatters.com

April 10, 1994 was my 27th birthday. That same week my generation’s greatest musical icon – Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain – ended his life with the same number of candles on his recent birthday cake. The music press went into high gear reporting the shock of Cobain’s tragic ending while simultaneously reflecting on its inevitability. After all, he was a troubled soul with a history of substance abuse, failed rehab stints, overdoses, and suicide attempts.

It didn’t take long before finger pointing began. In their grief, family, friends, and fans were reluctant to accept that their loved one died by his own hand. It was easier to blame someone else. Cobain’s marriage to Courtney Love was less than idyllic and she was loathed by many in the Nirvana community. This made her an obvious scapegoat. Eventually, conspiracy theorists floated the idea that Cobain’s death wasn’t a suicide at all, but that Love had him murdered.

While the music community mourned the loss of one of its giants, the spin moved on to Cobain’s legacy. He’d only lived long enough to spearhead three proper studio albums with Nirvana, but in the process was hailed as a revolutionary who’d birthed a new genre of music. Should he be immortalized alongside other musical icons who died at age 27? Was it fair to utter his name in the same breath as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and Robert Johnson?

These are all plays straight out of the Rock ‘n’ Roll 101 handbook, specifically the chapter on how to handle a rock star who checks out in his or her prime. It goes like this. First, express shock over Young Rock Star’s death and report on the outpouring of love and respect from the musical community. While that reality is still sinking in, switch gears completely and report on the inevitability of said Rock Star’s demise. After all, in light of his or her habits and lifestyle, who didn’t see this coming?

Next, the public wants answers. Not only should they be offered gory and gruesome details as if this were an episode of CSI or some other crime investigation show, but supplied with detailed exploits of the Young Rock Star’s last days.

The fans also need a target upon whom to vent their anger. Why wasn’t the record company babysitting its star more? Shouldn’t the family have done more to intervene? How about that destructive relationship? Sure the Young Rock Star may have exhibited every sign of a death wish, but can’t we ultimately blame someone else for this?

With Young (now Dead) Rock Star barely in the grave, it’s time to focus on his or her legacy. After all, our beloved hero has been dead for days! It’s about time we move on and figure out our idol’s place in the whole of musical history. How should this Dead Young Rock Star be remembered? Also, to generate controversy, plenty of press should be afforded to detractors who callously lambast Young Rock Star as overrated.

The final matter is two-fold: 1) how can Dead Young Rock Star be immortalized with such a slim discography and; 2) how can record companies shamelessly profit on Dead Young Rock Star’s death by raiding the vaults for unreleased material?

Amy Winehouse’s recent death required anyone associated with the recording industry or music journalism to dust off their Rock ‘n’ Roll 101 manuals. A quick overview shows her story to be eerily reminiscent of Cobain’s. Tabloids salivated over her exploits with substance abuse, failed rehab attempts, and a not quite two-car-garage-and-picket-fence marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil. It didn’t take long before Winehouse’s father publicly blamed his daughter’s death on the ex-husband because he had introduced Amy to drugs.

Conflicting accounts emerged regarding events in the days leading up to her death. Had she gone on a drug-buying spree just the night before? Had a physician just proclaimed her to be in good health? Did she die because she was fighting so hard to overcome her demons that her body collapsed from alcohol withdrawl? Posing these questions naturally draws out anyone who ever partied with Winehouse, sat in on a recording session, or hung out with her in a seedy bar. All of them weigh in with their takes on what she was really like.

Even with the public still grieving, talk turned to Winehouse’s status in Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven. Does she deserve enshrinement alongside other musicians who passed on to that great gig in the sky, with only 27 years on planet Earth?

The matter of her slim two-album discography led detractors to say no. The jazzy Frank (2003) was critically hailed, but certainly not considered a game changer. The 2006 follow-up, Back to Black, was hailed as a landmark of both retro-soul and neo-soul. No, I’m not sure how it can be both, either. Whatever it is genre-wise, is Back to Black truly deserving of the “classic album” tag?

Whatever title was latched to her sound, it became the consensus that Winehouse launched a wave of white, British, female R&B/pop singers like Adele, Duffy, and Florence & the Machine.

Finally, there’s the “What will the record companies do next?” route. Winehouse hadn’t been dead a week before stories flooded the Internet about what was or wasn’t in the vaults that might see the light of day. Depending on the account, there’s the “let’s respect the family’s wishes” angle or the idea that if there’s a tape of Winehouse farting, let’s release it to the public – you know, because we deserve to hear it all.

Are there three albums worth of material? Is it just a handful of demos? When someone recently broke into her house, how much music did they steal? Will something be released before the end of the year? I think of the song “Paint a Vulgar Picture” by the Smiths: “At the record company meeting/ On their hands a dead star/ And oh, the plans they weave/ And oh, the sickening greed.”

What gets overlooked amidst the sensationalism are detailed expositions on what led to the tragedy. Why does our entertainment culture salivate over both the construction and destruction of its stars? Is the same quality that drives attention seekers to the spotlight what also causes them to self-destruct?

History is littered with artistic geniuses who could barely run their personal lives even as the world worshiped them. The urge to create is often a double-edged sword saddled with a propensity to destroy. Our greatest musical legends are often troubled souls who likely would have had difficult lives in or out of the limelight.

Through it all, however, we should never lose sight of some basics. The Rock ‘n’ Roll 101 Handbook doesn’t acknowledge that its Dead Young Rock Stars had parents, siblings, spouses, children, and friends. They had their problems but were adored by millions. They made music which touched people’s souls and changed people’s lives. The Kurt Cobains, Amy Winehouses, and other musical geniuses who walked this planet for far too short a time deserve to be embraced. They were flawed, but they were also beloved.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

This content is taken from the The Top 100 Songs of the Rock Era, 1954-1999, available at DavesMusicDatabase.com as a standard book or ebook!

“Mack the Knife” originated in 1928 as “Moritat,” which translates to “murder deed.” RCG Bertlot Brecht and Kurt Weill wrote the original German song about “a bloodthirsty Berlin gangster” RS500 on the prowl for the musical The Three Penny Opera. Despite the song’s gruesome subject matter, the irresistible melody made the song hit-worthy. KL Instead of translating the lyrics literally, Marc Blitzstein was assigned to give the song a rewrite. SJ

The song had become a standard before Darin ever recorded it. “Mack” charted six times in 1956; the Dick Hyman Trio’s #8 instrumental version being the most successful. However, Darin’s version trumped them all.

A year earlier, at age twenty-two, Darin first hit with the “Splish Splash”, followed by three more hits which cemented his appeal to the teen market. However, Darin wanted the kind of longevity enjoyed by Frank Sinatra. At the time he even told Billboard, “In night clubs I learn to other things. I even do ‘Mack the Knife.’” BB100

For his standards album That’s All, Darin recorded the song, but he never saw it being a single. SJ His record company thought otherwise and the song transformed Darin’s image into that of “a finger-snapping sophisticate at home in the cocktail lounge.” RS500

August 22, 2011: Songwriter, producer, and performer Nickolas Ashford died of complications from throat cancer at age 70. He was born in Fairfield, South Carolina, on May 4, 1942. He met Valerie Simpson in 1963 and they began working together as writers and performers. They married in 1974.

In the mid-‘60s, the pair composed hits for Aretha Franklin, the Fifth Dimension, Ronnie Milsap, Maxine Brown, the Shirelles, and Chuck Jackson. In 1966, they scored a major break when Ray Charles took his cover of the Coasters’ “Let’s Go Get Stoned” (written by Ashford & Simpson) to #1 on the R&B charts.

Their work with Charles brought them to the attention of Motown’s Berry Gordy. The team then joined Motown where they became the primary writers for the duets between Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (#19 pop, #3 R&B), “Your Precious Love” (#5 pop, #2 R&B), “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” (#8 pop, #1 R&B), and “You’re All I Need to Get By” (#7 pop, #1 R&B).

At Motown, they also worked with Gladys Knight & The Pips, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, The Marvelettes, and The Supremes. The pair also wrote and produced hits for Diana Ross, including three 1970 hits – “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand” (#20 pop, #7 R&B), a cover of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (#1 pop, #1 R&B), and “Remember Me” (#16 pop, #10 R&B).

They left Motown in 1973 but still found success, most notably with Chaka Khan’s 1978 hit “I’m Every Woman” (#21 pop, #1 R&B). Whitney Houston covered the song in 1993 with even greater success (#3 pop, #1 R&B). During their post-Motown years, Ashford & Simpson also found their greatest success as performers with 1984’s “Solid” (#12 pop, #1 R&B).

August 22, 2011: Jerry Leiber, one of the most important songwriters in rock history, died of cardiopulmonary failure at age 78. He generally wrote lyrics while Mike Stoller, his songwriting partner for 60 years, typically handled the music. Among the artists for whom the pair penned songs were Elvis Presley, the Coasters, and the Drifters.

Leiber was born in 1933 to Jewish immigrants from Poland and grew up on the edge of the black ghetto in Baltimore. Leiber was a high school senior when he met Stoller, a Queens-born New Yorker who shared Leiber’s love of boogie-woogie and the blues. Before they were even 20, they’d penned “Hound Dog”, which became a #1 R&B hit for Big Mama Thornton in 1953. Three years later, Elvis Presley’s cover of the song would become one of the biggest songs in rock and roll history. Elvis recorded more than twenty Leiber/Stoller compositions, including the #1’s “Jailhouse Rock” and “Don’t”.

They were also noted for most of the hits for the Coasters, which the Songwriters Hall of Fame called “the court jesters of rock and roll kingdom”. Leiber & Stoller wrote “Searchin’”, “Young Blood”, “Yakety Yak”, “Charlie Brown”, “Along Came Jones”, “Poison Ivy”, and “Smokey Joe’s Café”. As Stoller told Rolling Stone in 1990, “we were writing to amuse ourselves…We got very lucky in the sense that at some point what we wrote also amused a lot of other people.” RS

They also were successful as producers. After a successful run with Atlantic Records in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, they launched their own label, Red Bird Records, in 1964. They helped shape the girl-group sound with classics like the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love” and the Shangri-La’s “Leader of the Pack”. Their last major hit as a producing team came with Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” in 1972.

Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock” and Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” are all featured in the DMDB book The Top 100 Songs of the Rock Era, 1954-1999. They are DMDB top 1000 songs along with Wilbert Harrison’s “Kansas City”, the Coasters’ “Searchin’”, and the Drifers’ “On Broadway” and “There Goes My Baby”.

Monday, August 22, 2011

This content is taken from the The Top 100 Songs of the Rock Era, 1954-1999, available at DavesMusicDatabase.com as a standard book or ebook!

Martha Reeves was a secretary at Motown when she got the opportunity of a lifetime – she was given the chance to record a demo. RS500 The song, “Dancing in the Street,” was originally offered to Kim Weston, who would later marry William Stevenson, RS500 one of the writers, but she turned it down. NRR As Stevenson says, though, “When Martha got into the song…that was the end of the conversation!” RS500

Stevenson says the inspiration for the song came from riding through Detroit during the summer with Marvin Gaye, another of the song’s writers. To let the kids cool off, the city would open up the fire hydrants to release the water into the streets. Stevenson says, “They appeared to be dancing in the water.” SF

Of all the dance songs ever written, none come as close as this one to “conveying not only the physical experience but the emotional tenor of what it means to dance publicly.” MA The song’s “primal rhythms [are]…so simple anyone can groove to it and so infectious everyone does.” AMG As “the quintessential hymn of revolution, riot, and rapture” it makes everyone want to join the party. WI

What’s astonishing about Cline’s place in country music history is how little impact she had from a chart standpoint. At the time of her tragic death by a plane crash in 1963, she had charted a mere nine songs on the Billboard country charts. She had another ten posthumous hits, but her total of nineteen chart doesn’t even rank her in the top 200 country artists of all time according to the Billboard charts!

The song was written by Willie Nelson before he became one of country music’s most celebrated singers. She needed a follow-up to another one of her classics – “I Fall to Pieces” – and was interested in Nelson’s song “Funny How Time Slips Away”. Unfortunately, Nelson had already given it to his long-time friend Billy Walker. Walker suggested “Crazy”, but Cline was not impressed with it. She didn’t want a slow, torch song, but something more up-tempo. However, her producer Owen Bradley convinced her to give it a shot. The result was her only top ten pop hit and what Willie Nelson called “the favorite of anything I ever wrote.” CL

August 20 marks the birth of one of the greatest classic rockers of all-time – Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant (1948). The day before saw the birthdays of three others – Cream drummer Ginger Baker (1939), Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan (1945), and Queen bassist John Deacon (1951). What better way to celebrate than with a list of the best classic rock albums of all-time, a list on which each of the aforementioned groups appears at least once?

This list was determined by an aggregate of 13 best-of lists focused on classic rock. It is very apparent how much classic rock is an album format when comparing this list to the best-albums-of-all-time list. 49 of the albums on this list also make the top 100 albums of all time list. Another 46 titles make the DMDB list of the top 1000 albums of all time.

Note: This list was originally posted on Facebook on May 2, 2011. Also, most of the album titles (and all of the album photos) below link to more detailed pages about that album.

The album’s lead single, “Friends in Low Places”, was the first of four #1 country songs off Brooks’ sophomore effort – and the biggest hit of his career. He found the song through writers Bud Lee and DeWayne Blackwell. Brooks was working as a shoe salesman in Nashville and looking for his big break when the songwriting team came in to buy boots. They agreed to let Brooks record some demos for them. CL The last one, “Friends in Low Places”, came after Brooks had landed a deal with Capitol Records and was about to release his debut album. Brooks was taken enough with the song to record it a year later when he was readying his second album.

He was born in Philadelphia, Pennysylvania on May 25, 1877 and raised in Denver, Colorado. His death on August 17, 1954, marked a last hurrah for the pre-1920s pioneer era of music. He has been called the most sensational record seller of that time. At a time before radio ruled the waves and recording technology remained primitive, Billy Murray’s success gave the fledgling recording industry the credibility to develop into a popular form of entertainment. “In an era dominated by the operatically-influenced singing style, he helped to popularize a more natural approach. He was an incredibly versatile artist” JL whose “records serve as excellent representatives of the music and events of American culture.” DN The recording careers of other 20th century musical giants such as Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles pale in comparison.

He charted more than 200 hits and 30 number ones are songs as a solo artist and as lead with the Haydn Quartet, the American Quartet, the Columbia Comedy Trio, and the Heidelberg Quintet. He also recorded numerous duets with Ada Jones. Among those songs are a number of classics which make the Dave’s Music Database list of the top 1000 songs of the 20th century. These include “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” (1904), “In My Merry Oldsmobile” (1905), “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (with the Haydn Quartet, 1908), “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” (with the Haydn Quartet, 1910), “Casey Jones” (with the American Quartet, 1910), “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine” (with the American Quartet & Ada Jones, 1911), “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” (with the American Quartet, 1911), and “K-K-K-Katy (The Stammering Song)” (1918).

In keeping with the daily-dose-of-musical-history format which I adopted in June 2011, my initial intent was to work up a 300-500 word piece capturing a snapshot of the famous Woodstock music festival from August 15-18, 1969. In the end, however, the endeavor failed. A proper vision of Woodstock throws objectivity out the window, so I opted instead to rewind to an essay I wrote two years ago in celebration of Woodstock’s 40th anniversary. I’ve infused that original piece with images and video. Anyway, check out the link below. Peace.

These are the top 100 R&B/soul albums of all time as determined by Dave’s Music Database. This list was devised by compiling 22 R&B and/or soul-oriented best-of lists into an aggregate list. This list was then merged with the albums’ overall status in Dave’s Music Database to create this R&B/soul-specific list.